China has undergone a great transformation within a short period of time. An open economy, though still under control, has pushed the once-backward, poverty-ridden Communist country into an economic superpower within three decades. But wealth and progress come with complicated questions, such as that of how modernity affects individual identity, especially for women.
Launched last month, “Kwam Rak Dai Ja Mai Puad Road” offers readers a life of modern middle class couples in China, where many women need to sacrifice their career ambition to fulfil motherly role. The book is translated by HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn.
The answer might not be encouraging according to Kwam Rak Dai Ja Mai Puad Raow (Any Love Without Pain), a novel by Chuan Ni, pen name for the Chinese writer Liu Chuan Feng. The book has been translated by Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, who has translated a number of Chinese novels, plays and essays. Published by Nanmee Books, the book was released last month.
It offers a glimpse of the identity struggle modern white-collar Chinese women are facing. Award-winning writer Liu uses her succinct and graceful prose — translated with sensibility and accuracy to original prose by the Princess — to bring readers to see the mind and thought of a modern Chinese woman who needs to give up her work life to fulfil the role of mother and wife.
Liu Chuan Feng.
“The book reflects a reality of some but not all Chinese families. It will tell you how much middle-class couples in China need to go through,” says Liu, who reveals that she was inspired to write the novel when taking a two-year break from her literary career to raise her newborn. Staying home gave her the chance to mingle with urban housewives in a residential Beijing neighbourhood, which in her novel is a symbol for the collision between tradition and modernity.
In the book, the character Min Min is not an ideal mum. Ambitious and free, she loves her job but doesn’t want to have children. Min Min has two abortions despite her husband’s desire to have a baby. Finally she becomes a mother, giving birth to fulfil her role as a woman and please her husband. As expected, motherhood is depressing, and motherly travails weigh down on her. She becomes brooding and overweight. As for those acts that occur between the sheets, love and lust dried up after the baby arrived.
The book offers insight into China’s young middle-class — a lonely, alienated generation that can be interpreted as a product of China’s one-child policy as well as capitalism.
Even though the book confronts the submissive role of Chinese women, Liu says the role of women has begun to change. There’s an increasing number of educated and financially independent women who refuse to get married. Being a single woman in China carries a high price, with those women being referred to as sheng nu, “leftover women”. But Liu looks at this circumstance with hope.
“That also means we attain more freedom to choose and become selective. Late marriage suggests that women prefer quality over quantity.”
Later in the book, Min Min becomes emotionally disenfranchised from her husband, and she runs away from the home to take a break with her single female friend, to find out her friend has gotten cancer and been taken in by her ageing mother. Finally, she has to find a way to compromise with life’s burdens while also maintaining her identity.
“I hope this book will enable readers to understand life and love in more than one way,” says the writer. “Male readers might understand women and their wives better. People who once believed the most dreadful life is that without love will gain a new perspective — that we can live peacefully even without love, and that there is also a way to love without pain.”
This source first appeared on Bangkok Post Lifestyle.